Chapter 5

A Chapter by Chris

Several weeks had passed since we went to Kings Island. I didn't really get a chance to see Jack that much during that time because he was always too busy. Whenever I tried to call, there was never usually an answer. If Jack or someone else did happen to answer the phone, the answer was that Jack had to go do something in a little bit or Jack was somewhere else at the moment.

Luckily he was free one weekend though. He called on Saturday asking if I wanted to go swimming, saying that they had a swimming pool now. I agreed and told him that I would be down soon. After I changed into my swimming trunks and grabbed a beach towel, I made my way down to his house.

We quickly went to the backyard when I got there and walked up onto the deck that was built along one side of the circular pool. After waiting for a couple minutes until his mother came out to supervise us, we were allowed to get in. I was about to jump in when Jack decided to shove me into it before jumping in after me.

“You idiot!” I yelled at him before splashing him with some water.

He laughed a little before splashing me back. We spent a few minutes splashing each other and chasing each other around the pool before going onto other things, one of them being Marco Polo. I didn't do too well at the game. It took me long lengths of time to be able to find him every time I was Marco. I wouldn't have been surprised though if Jack cheated a couple times by getting out of the pool.

After about an hour, Jack's mother went into the house to go do something. She didn't bother telling us to get out while she was away, so we just stayed in the pool. I was laying on a foam blue float at the time and Jack swam over towards me until he reached the side of it. He crossed his arms over the side and rested his chin on his lower arm as he looked at me.

“How's come you're always busy now?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Jack replied while giving a small shrug. “Mom wanted me to join cub scouts and for some reason I have to go help her run errands a lot.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, and my dad wants me to join the football team too. I kinda hate it. I don't really wanna do all that stuff.”

“Then don't.”

“I have to. They're making me. They always make me join sports and do other things. I can't wait until I grow up so I won't have to do these things anymore.”

I gave a nod, but didn't say anything. There was a few seconds of silence as Jack appeared to be thinking about something.

“You know, we should live together when we're grown up,” he said. “It would be fun, and we won't have to worry about being too busy to see each other because we'll always be able to see each other.”

I chuckled a little and agreed to it. It sounded like a great idea to me. We were great friends after all, and I didn't think there was anything terribly wrong with it. There were some guys that sometimes lived together, right?

Jack's mother came back out now and after seeing this, Jack flipped the float over that I was on so that I fell right into the water. We broke out into another splash war for a while before going on to doing a few other things.

When it was somewhere close to sundown, both of us were finally bored of being in the water. We got out and Jack proposed that I should sleep over for the night while we dried ourselves off with our towels. I said I wanted to, and after making sure it was all right with his mother, we walked up the street to see if it was okay with mine. After hearing the words both of us had hoped for, I grabbed some of my things to bring down there and stuffed them into a backpack I used the previous year for school.

Once we got back to his house, Jack and I went up to his room to play Super Smash Bros. I had gotten the hang of it ever since I played it when I first met Jack, but Jack was a lot better than me. Every time we played, he still always somehow managed to beat me unless luck happened to be on my side, but whenever that happened, Jack would always make up some stupid excuse about why he lost.

Jack's father later came up to give us the food we had asked for from MacDonald's. After we ate, Jack and I decided to go into the basement to watch a movie. When we got down there, Jack put a movie into the Playstation 2. As we watched the movie, both of us sat in a large lay-z-boy that was a faded pink in color; it was large enough for both of us to fit into easily without being crammed into it.

About halfway through the movie, that entire day of swimming started to catch up to me. My eyelids started to grow a little heavy and I felt myself starting to doze off a couple times. It wasn't even nine o'clock in the evening yet though, so I didn't wanted to try to stay awake until at least the movie was over.

“Tired?” Jack asked a few minutes later when I almost nodded off to sleep for the fifth time.

“No,” I lied, trying to deny it, even though it was completely obvious.

“You can rest your head on me if you want,” he told me.

I just shrugged while I tried to watch the movie through my half-closed eyelids. He soon wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me towards him so that I gently fell with my head resting on his upper chest near the shoulder. Heat rushed to my cheeks as this happened and I could feel the strange feelings I felt before when Jack tackled me in the snow on Christmas Eve. I wasn't even completely sure if it was right for two guys to be doing something like this, but it didn't bother me a bit. It felt right to me and it felt kind of nice. I didn't really know why at the time, but I felt kind of happy being there in Jack's arm.

I was roused from my sleep by Jack shaking me. When I sat up, I heard him say something about the movie being over. The clock over on the wall said that it was nearly ten o'clock. The hour-and-a-half I got of sleep wasn't really enough to get me awake and it appeared that Jack was tired now too.

We decided that we should go to bed now and so we headed upstairs to Jack's bedroom. Jack normally slept on the bottom bunk, which left the top one for me. When I climbed up onto it, Jack turned off the light so that the only light left was the bit that came from a small nightlight. I dozed off a few seconds afterwards.

I woke up at around nine o'clock in the morning the following day – probably the longest I've ever slept in a while. When I was completely awake, I looked down at the bottom bunk to see that Jack was still asleep. I didn't want to wake him up, so I figured I would just lay there and wait. After about five minutes passed though, I got a little bored and wanted something to do to keep me entertained while I waited. It was then when I recalled that I brought my Game Boy Color with me.

Deciding to play that, I climbed down the wooden ladder and walked over to the backpack that I stuffed with things the previous day. As I started to dig through it to find the handheld game, I glanced over towards Jack. I noticed that a bit of the covers was off of him, revealing his butt (though he was wearing boxers). I glanced a few more times until my hand finally found the gaming device that I originally came down there to get. After I pulled it out of the bag, I went back onto the top bunk. I turned down the volume on the Game Boy Color before turning it on so that the sound wouldn't disturb the sleeping boy below.

Jack didn't wake up for about another hour; he liked to sleep in real late (or at least I considered that to be real late at the time). He noticed that I was playing my Game Boy and asked how long I had been up. I told him and he questioned why I didn't bother waking him. I said I just decided to let him sleep. It wasn't like he told me to wake him up if I got up first anyway, or did I just not hear him tell me that last night? Oh well, it was too long ago for me to remember.

After we ate breakfast, we went back up to Jack's room to play a little. By the time it was mid afternoon, we got bored with that and decided to go to the playground that was across the field behind my house. We told Jack's mother where we were going before running across the large field until we arrived at the playground a couple minutes later. It was completely empty of any other kids, but it wasn't surprising. The playground here was never really in use unless there were sports practices or games going on in the field. Not like it really mattered to us that the playground was empty though; it just meant that we had the place to ourselves.

I walked over and sat on one of the two swings – which was as hard as a rock – as I tried to catch my breath. Jack walked over and sat on the other one and we decided to swing for a little bit. After a while, he got off of his and tagged me before breaking into a run. The swing set was surrounded by mulch, so I didn't think it would be a good idea to jump off in case I failed to land on my feet.

Instead, I slowed the swing to a stop until I was able to get off of it, but by then Jack had already hid. It took a little time, but I finally found Jack hiding in the tunnel slide. I quickly tried to slide down it to tag him, but he had already slid down the rest of the way and ran off before I was able to. When I got out of the slide, I quickly gave chase, but I wasn't as quick as what Jack was.

The two of us continued to play tag for a good length of time. I was usually the tagger for the most part because Jack never did have too much trouble tagging me. We got tired after about an hour though and decided to stop. After we caught our breath, we decided to go onto playing other things.

Our fun only lasted for about another two hours before we got bored. Thinking we might as well head back to Jack's house, we left the playground, but we decided to walk the trail that ran around the edges of the field until we got to the road to where we could walk up to his house. There was woods near the trail and we soon arrived at an opening in it about a few minutes later. Jack and I stopped and looked in it to see a river down at the bottom of a hill.

“Hey, let's go down there for a little bit,” Jack suggested.

I didn't have any problem with it and so we made our way along the dirt trail until we came to the rocky banks of the river. Both of us started to skip rocks, but I wasn't able to get any to skip. Jack tried to show me, but it didn't help any and he just jeered at me for it while he skipped his until they almost reached the opposite side of the river.

We continued to do this for a while. Every now and then Jack would glance at me. I tried to ask him why, but he just shrugged it off and never gave me an answer. After the fourth attempt of trying to ask him, I just gave up and resumed skipping rocks until I became too frustrated to continue. I went up away from the bank a little ways until it was no longer rocky to sit down. Jack walked over and sat down beside me a little later. I looked towards him to see him fidgeting with his fingers a little while he looked down at them as if engrossed by them.

“Something wrong?” I asked him.

He looked up at me as if he didn't hear what I said, but it soon apparently registered.

“No,” he said as he looked back down at his fingers.

“You sure?”

Jack nodded. I had a good feeling that he was lying though, but I didn't bother trying to pry anymore since the boy obviously wasn't going to tell me. My gaze turned to the river, watching it's somewhat swift current.

“Um, Jay,” Jack said.

“Hm?” I hummed questioningly as I looked back at him.

He fidgeted with his fingers for a couple more seconds before looking at me. There seemed to be a couple seconds of hesitation as he sat there, but he soon leaned in towards me. My eyes widened as our lips collided, but Jack pulled away about a couple seconds later. I stared at him, completely taken by surprise of what he did. He looked away from me and down at the ground; I did the same thing.

I was completely confused by what Jack did. I didn't know whether laying with another guy like I did with Jack the previous night was all right, but I was certain that a guy kissing another guy wasn't normal. It was always boys and girls kissing in the stories and movies, never two boys. And that was the part that confused me the most. It wasn't completely because of the fact that Jack kissed me, but rather because of the way I felt afterwards. I wasn't even completely aware of the fact that what I might have been feeling was love at the time, but I had an urge to kiss Jack back.

I never got myself around to doing that though. Instead, we sat there in complete silence for a couple minutes until Jack finally decided that we should probably head back. When I got back there though, Jack's mother told me that Mom called for me just before I walked in the door. It probably didn't really matter though because Jack looked a little upset, so he probably wasn't really in the mood to play anymore anyway. After I grabbed my things, I headed back home.

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